Page:Mind (New Series) Volume 8.djvu/19

PHILOSOPHY AND THE STUDY OF PHILOSOPHERS. 5 and quality, cause and effect, matter and mind, by the help of which the obscure chaos of uninterpreted sensation or feeling is arranged into the more or less orderly world of ordinary and scientific belief. Our ordinary or common-sense knowledge is full of tacit assumptions and presuppositions, some of which are retained, while others are discarded, by the special sciences. However much we try to avoid assump- tions in speaking about the facts of consciousness, we cannot do so. The language we have received as part of our social inheritance is full of idola fori, and (unless we are barbarians) of idola theatri also. No avoidance of metaphysics, but only serious metaphysical effort enables us to detect these assump- tions. " Enough metaphysics to get rid of metaphysical ideas " means in truth a very thorough metaphysical training, and, not merely a great deal of logical acuteness in un- ravelling complex concepts lurking under apparently simple words, but a knowledge of the history of thought in the past which has gone to form the intellectual ground on which we are standing, the intellectual atmosphere we breathe. If geology and chemical analysis have a scientific interest, apart from the practical benefits they may bring to the health and the wealth of nations, the study of the ideas of the past which have gone to mould our language and our beliefs has as great, if not a greater, intellectual interest and may have a very important, even though indirect, influence on the life of society, especially in the spheres of politics and religion, where unconscious and therefore uncriticised metaphysics is apt to cause serious mischief. Undoubtedly there is a great attractiveness in the seeming freedom from the burden of historical tradition and from the dusty toil of historical research with which some philosophers, and among them some of the greatest, have attacked directly and single-handed the problems of knowledge and reality. Why, it may be urged, should we not always discuss our questions at first hand, with the freshness of a Socratic dialogue, instead of cumbering ourselves with the opinions of our predecessors, as Aristotle does in his Metaphysics, the book in which philosophy seems to lose its primitive direct outlook on experience and to begin to stiffen into scholas- ticism ? Undoubtedly a great deal of the prevalent historical interest in philosophers of the past is not properly interest in philosophy ; the two interests may even sometimes, as Green said, be in the inverse ratio. 1 Much of the study of Plato 1 Cf. his edition of Hume, vol. i., p. 4 (" General Introduction," 4). I suppose he was thinking primarily of G. H. Lewes' biographical History.